In every one of his natural and ethical books, he
asserts vice to be the very essence of unhappiness; writing and contending that to live viciously is the same thing
as to live unhappily. But in his Third Book of Nature,
having said that it is profitable for a fool to live rather
than to die, though he is never to become wise, he subjoins: ‘For such is the nature of good things among
men, that evil things are in some sort preferred before indifferent ones.’ I let pass therefore, that having elsewhere said that nothing is profitable to fools, he here says
that to live foolishly is profitable to them. Now those
things being by them called indifferent which are neither
bad nor good, when he says that bad things precede them,
he says nothing else but that evil things precede those
that are not evil, and that to be unhappy is more profitable than not to be unhappy; and if so, he esteems not
to be unhappy to be more unprofitable—and if more
unprofitable, more hurtful—than to be unhappy. Desiring therefore to mitigate this absurdity, he adds concerning evils: ‘But it is not these evils that are preferred,
but reason; with which it is more convenient to live,
though we shall be fools.’ First therefore he says that
vice and things participating of vice are evil, and that
nothing else is so. Now vice is something reasonable, or
rather depraved reason. For those therefore who are
fools to live with reason, is nothing else but to live with
vice. Thence to live being fools is to live being unhappy.
In what then is this preferred to indifferent things? For
he surely will not say that with regard to happiness unhappiness is to be preferred. But neither, say they, does
Chrysippus altogether think that the remaining in life is
to be reckoned amongst good things, or the going out of
it amongst bad; but both of them amongst indifferent
ones, according to Nature. Wherefore also it sometimes
becomes meet for the happy to make themselves away,
[p. 447]
and again for the unhappy to continue in life. Now what
greater repugnance can there be than this in the choice
and avoiding of things, if it is convenient for those who
are in the highest degree happy to forsake those good
things that are present, for the want of some one indifferent thing? And yet they esteem none of the indifferent
things either desirable or to be avoided; but only good desirable, and only evil to be avoided. So that it comes to
pass, according to them, that the reasoning about actions
regards neither things desirable nor things refusable; but
that aiming at other things, which they neither shun nor
choose, they make life and death dependent on these.
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